


Type-2 False Awakening

by Mitsuhachi



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-23
Updated: 2011-04-23
Packaged: 2017-10-18 13:15:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mitsuhachi/pseuds/Mitsuhachi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim opens his eyes. His room is dark, quiet, and for a minute, he wonders what woke him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Type-2 False Awakening

**Author's Note:**

> I want to seriously warn people for EXTREMELY GRAPHICALLY DEPICTED VIOLENCE. There's also allusions to childhood abuse/trauma, genocide, and sexual assault. This may be extremely triggering for some people.
> 
> Written for the Kinkmeme prompt: _Hollywood sucks, y'know? Their accepted method of waking up from a horrible nightmare has leaked its way into my literature, and that's just wrong. When you wake up from a nightmare, you don't rocket into a sitting position, gasping for breath. Physiologically, you can't, not that soon after awakening._
> 
>  _So, kind anon, I would like some nightmare hurt and comfort. I don't really care who's having the nightmare, be it Jim, Spock, Nyota, Bones, Sulu, or Chekov. Whoever it is, and whatever he/she is having a nightmare about, they don't rocket up as soon as they wake. Instead, their partner realizes that something is wrong from body language, fear through the bond (if Spock is involved), etc, and proceeds to comfort them."_

Jim opens his eyes.

His room is dark, quiet, and for a minute, he wonders what woke him. Outside, there is shouting and the heavy thud of people running. Through the bulkhead, he catches bits of it: “Don’t touch me! I’ll—“ “What is your name, citizen?” “—t on the list. Elimin—“ It only takes his sleep-fuzzed brain a moment to understand what’s going on out there, even if he doesn’t know any details of who or why. The universe over, military police have the same cadence in their voices, and Jim Kirk is out of his bed and running before the thought can even fully form.

The hallway is hellish. There’s just no other word for it. The high whine of phaser fire shrieks over the repeated roar of antique projectile weapons; people are screaming somewhere further along where he can’t see. The police, like Kodos’ men, travel in packs of three, their metal-tipped boots ringing against the metal flooring. One group of them catches a young woman in Engineering red—Ensign Woo?—demanding she identify herself and twisting her arms behind her until there’s a sickly pop. Two more have cornered a pair of navigators between them, not even bothering to check them against the lists before hacking them apart with honest-to-gods-damned axes, like they’d grabbed anything that was to hand when the resources ran out and all Kodos would give them was orders.

He has to get to the bridge, has to find Spock and figure out what was going on, work out a means of defense. He sets off running towards turbolift C, bare feet slipping in the slick wash of purple blood flooding across the hall. Behind him, teams are shouting at each other, and he knows that they’ll be following him as soon as they figure themselves out—but it hasn’t been so long that he doesn’t still remember how to run, and this is HIS ship. This is the goddamned Enterprise, and he _knows_ this ship. He’s been over every wiring shaft, every nut and bolt with Scotty even before he’d been made Captain officially. This is the Enterprise, with the best crew in Starfleet, four hundred lives that he is responsible for, winking out one by one because he can’t do anything yet to protect them. He tucks his chin lower against his chest and _runs_.

Either they’ve figured out what he’s trying to do or there’s some kind of damage to the electrical systems; half of the side corridors he passes are entirely black, others with only a light or two flickering intermittently like something out of a horror movie. He skids around the corner to the turbolift and curses, seeing the doors standing open on an empty shaft, floor-lights dark. There’s nothing for it—he’ll have to climb. He can’t take the time to fix it, can’t contact engineering (and how in the hell had they managed to intercept comms anyway?) and he fairly _throws_ himself across the empty shaft, clinging to the bars of the service ladder as his heart pounds. The adrenaline makes him want to be sick, but he can’t spare the time or the energy, just swallows it back and starts to climb. It’s horrifically taxing—they never intended the service ladders to be used for more than a floor or two, he’ll have to talk to security about countermeasures in case this comes up again—and his shoulders are screaming at him before he hits deck five. When he lifts his hand to smack at the emergency override for the door lock at deck one, his muscles are hot and shaky enough that for a minute he’s afraid he’s going to fall, but the doors woosh open and he’s able to pull himself up onto the deck, laying on the metal floor and panting.

The bridge is a bloodbath.

McCoy barely has a bruise on him—Kirk takes a half-hysterical moment to remember how fucking hopeless Bones had always been in the self-defense classes, never wanted to hurt people, even if he had to—and you’d never have known he’d tried to put up any kind of fight at all if it weren’t for the way they’ve got him strung up by the wrists, delicate surgeon’s hands slowly purpling with loss of circulation, with his own rubber tourniquet. His tricorder is nothing but scattered parts by his feet, but one of the MP is holding his laser scalpel. Kirk watches, frozen, as they slice cleanly through his breastbone, peeling back the skin and muscle until the faint pink fluttering of his lungs peeks through the white of his ribs.

He can see that Uhura must have tried to fight—her phaser’s gone and one of the MP has her knife, while two more have deep scratch marks near their eyes—but they’ve got her pinned now. They’re in the process of ripping out the nail on her left pinky, the others already gone, and he can practically hear the way her exquisitely trained vocal chords are snapping under the way she’s screaming and screaming.

He doesn’t even know what Sulu must have done. The man’s laying in a pool of his own blood in between the flight station and the doors to the turbolift. Half of his handsome face is painted with it, but the other half is eaten away by chemical burns, nothing but charred meat. One of his shoes is missing, and his uniform overshirt, like he’d come running half-awake like Kirk had.

Chekov is sitting against the front of the flight station, one leg twisted at an unnatural angle, dangling from his hip like someone had tried to spread it and then just kept going. He’s covered in blood, though Kirk can’t see where he’s hurt, but the part that worries him the most is the blank way he’s staring, dead-eyed and empty. He’s seen that look before, on strong women and pretty boys and helpless kids; he never, ever wanted to see one of his people look that way again, and he can taste the hot, metal-salt flavor of where he’s bitten through his own tongue trying to rein in his rage. “Keptin…” the boy is mumbling. “Keptin---they are… We waited for you. Mr. Sulu said you would come, tell us what to do, but you didn’t come.” He sounds like he’s going to cry, but the expression on his face doesn’t change, and he’s still not meeting Kirk’s eyes. “Why didn’t you come. Keptin?”

He opens his mouth, but can’t force anything out past the way his throat has closed up. Doesn’t know what he’d have said anyway, what do you say to that? Chekov is fucking _seventeen_ and he’d been depending on Kirk to save him. He chokes, can hardly breathe through the pain in his chest, half-blind with tears he can’t hold back. He’s sobbing something incoherent, struggling to his feet, and all he can think is that Spock isn’t here. He’s not dead; if Jim can just find Spock, he knows they’ll find some way to fix this, they’ll help the others, he _knows_ it, he just has to—  
Which is, of course, the point when three squads of MP march Spock onto the middle of the bridge, phaser held to the back of his head. He meets Kirk’s eyes, calm, like there’s nothing to be fucking worried about, and when they push him to his knees, he goes gracefully. “Don’t—“ Kirk croaks out past the way his throat is closed, but Spock just keeps looking at him. “Don’t—what do you people even want, what’s—“ But they don’t even look over at Kirk before pulling the trigger, execution-style, and it’s not even the clean kill he knows all phasers give, but instead the kind of thing that leaves Spock pitching forward onto his face, the back of his head just entirely _gone_ and right then, something in Kirk dies. His face is wet, he can feel it, but he doesn’t know if he’s crying anymore. When the MP come for him, twisting his shoulders behind him and shouting some sort of questions at him, he doesn’t resist. He doesn’t think. He can’t do anything but stare down at the widening pool of green stretching towards his knees, and he—

Jim opens his eyes.

His room is dark, quiet. He takes one shuddering breath, listens bewildered for a long minute for the sounds of fighting outside, but there’s nothing. Maybe they’ve taken the whole ship, though he doesn’t know why they’d bother to dump him back here. Every muscle is seized up, knotted so tight he can’t move, and he’s almost afraid to try. Afraid to go see the burns and the gore streaking the bulkheads outside his quarters. He thinks of Mr. Spock’s calm, accepting eyes and can’t move, because if he moves it will be real. Part of him doesn’t ever want to move again.

Gradually though, he becomes aware of a cool body next to him, weighing down the narrow bed. _Spock_ , he thinks. Except that Spock is dead, and maybe they dumped both of them here, thought them both a couple of corpses. Jim blinks eyes sticky with dried tears and takes a deep breath. Or, maybe, it isn’t true at all. He knows he has nightmares. Hoping _hurts_ , a physical pain in his chest where he hasn’t been breathing, but it’s enough to let him raise one badly-shaking hand to Spock’s face, trying to feel for breath without smacking him in the face by accident, because if it isn’t real he doesn’t know what he’d tell Spock. He holds his breath, listening.

“Jim?” Kirk scrambled back onto his own side of the bed, trying to get his heart to calm down from its panic-race. Spock rolls over onto his side to face him, blinking sleepily. “Is there some matter of concern? Your breathing is most irregular, and I confess to being unsure what woke you.” Kirk breathes out a slow, shaky breath and tries to get himself under control. He knows he’s not going back to sleep anytime soon, for all his eyes are burning and his body is fairly begging for sleep.

“Ah—nothing.” He takes a minute to try to wrestle his voice into something a bit less ragged, though he knows already that Spock won’t buy it. They’re pressed together from hip to foot, Spock has to be able to feel how terrified he still is. “Nothing at all, Commander. I just.” Kirk falters for a minute, knowing he should get out of here and let Spock sleep, but really, really not wanting to go out into the rest of the ship. He’s still not one-hundred-percent convinced that if he does, he won’t find the carnage from before. He can still smell the burnt-hair stench from before, lingering in his mind. “I thought I’d, um. Check on gamma-shift. I haven’t had a chance to meet most of them, you know, I—“ Spock is just looking at him, knowing and quiet, and somehow that’s enough to make Kirk choke on his own remembered agony. He’d watched Spock _die_. “So yeah. I’m just going to go patrol, and—“

Warm fingers are laid over his, not moving, but just there. “I believe I will accompany you, Captain.” He draws in a breath to argue, because seriously, it’s like oh-two-hundred, but Spock just keeps on. “You are aware, of course, that Vulcans require less sleep than humans—it will be most practical and useful for me to aid you in your rounds.” There’s a long moment that passes then, where Kirk doesn’t cling to Spock like a girl and wail about how fucking scared he’d been and how much everyone had hurt, how he’d failed _everyone_ and Spock doesn’t whisper sappy things about how it was just a dream and everything is going to be alright. Kirk lets out a shuddery breath.

“Alright, then.” He says, and if his smile is still pretty fucking weak, it’s still a smile. “Let’s go mind the store.”


End file.
